A Hundred Lifetimes From Now

Up close, daily events seem more important than they are. While they have an impact, the lasting significance of life’s happenings is how they unfold as a process of learning and growth. As we humans experience and respond to life, dormant faculties awaken, making change and creativity possible.

We only tend to see this over the long haul. Here’s a thought experiment: think of the wise being you will be a hundred lifetimes from now as you watch humanity continue to grow over vast periods, a drama both inspiring and painful.

You will see times when we demonstrate the capacity and intelligence to craft societies of reciprocal care that allow our citizens to flourish materially in the world of form and spiritually across our inner dimensions. You will see moments of immense generosity and self-sacrifice. You will also witness appalling examples of our immaturity, when our survival instinct becomes warped, feeding cancers of greed and ambition, times when fear inflames our worst excesses.

After living through so many acts of the human drama, you would see that two aspects of being human govern how we grow: our capacities for awareness and love. You would have a deeper understanding of why things go better when we use these two capacities with maturity, acting from the higher aspects of our nature.

From the weight of ages, you would radiate a grounded resilience, knowing that even the worst of times must pass; your carrying capacity for grief would expand; your openness would allow you to feel and regulate emotions without turning away from pain; your ability to hold conundrums with no solid answers would enlarge; you would savor ecstatic joys without clinging; the spaciousness of your listening would comfort and console; your sense-perception and intuition would increase; your immersive connection with the cosmos would deepen, even as your desire to understand with mental precision lessens. A wisdom will have steeped in you that guides your actions and nonactions, channeling energy into creative and productive works.

All of these abilities exist in you now, like acorns planted long ago, waiting for the right conditions. These latent abilities grow as we learn to apply awareness and love to our daily experience: awareness, by training our attention and looking for the lessons that teach; love, by meeting each situation with all the care and kindness we can muster. Awareness and love are both the goals and the vehicles of growth – the more we use them, the more their power expands.

The long-term perspective of a hundred lifetimes helps us borrow from the future. By envisioning the beauty and brilliance we are becoming, we quicken their arrival. Something stirs when warmed by the light of imagination. Anticipation becomes actuality.

This is the world we are birthing, you and I, and all the other souls bumping about on the planet. It may seem we are acting at cross-purposes at times, but we are all working toward the same end. Our joint project of the human drama is not a static re-run, endlessly looping the same program, recirculating the same conflicts over and over. We are always in the process of formation, creating something new, becoming more fully human by learning how to embody more awareness and more love.

It may take more than a hundred lifetimes. No matter. I’m here anyway, and I can’t think of a better way to spend my time than growing into the best version of a human I can. What a glorious adventure. What a privilege to participate.

Watercolor by Elena Mozhvilo on Unsplash